22-17 Doors closing and doors opening

There is a common saying that when one door closes another opens, and I have found in my life that that does seem to be true.  The almost two years of Covid-lockdown did at times feel like a door firmly shut in my face, the obvious effect from a professional point of view being that I did not go on my twice-yearly visits to China or hold any seminars in this country.  The door, or doors, that opened have, however made up for this, if only partially, but in their own way quite dramatically.  For it gave me time to contemplate my life as a five element acupuncturist, and consider what, at my ripe old age, I still hoped to achieve, and this has led me, much to my surprise in quite new directions.

 

I have already blogged about my learning to teach in different ways (see my blog of 27 February 2022), through discovering the skill of learning to record myself on video.  In this way I used my new skill to record more than 100 short videos which continued my five element teaching for my Chinese students.  This new departure in my teaching life has now moved on a little more, and is spreading itself away from China into the English-speaking world, where some of these same videos will soon form part of an online five element teaching programme available outside China, as they could not be before.  The hands that opened that particular door for me are those of Gye Bennetts in Australia, who has taken from me all the load of setting up this online platform so that all I have to do now is some lightweight editing of what he is so ably putting together.

 

And another door has opened in relation to our seminar work in the UK.  Where Guy Caplan and I used together to organize our clinical seminars here in London, we have now become a trio.  With great joy we have welcomed Teresa Redding, one of my SOFEA graduates, to form part of our team.  She is proving incredibly efficient at taking on most of the administrative work from Guy's and my shoulders.

 

For anybody who has not yet received notification of our summer seminar on the Fire element on Monday 22 June, details can be downloaded from our website: www.sofea.co.uk, or by emailing Teresa at teresa@teresaredding.co.uk. 

 

No doubt there are other doors still to be opened before I come to the end of my five element activities, and I await them with great anticipation.  Not least there will be the publication of the autobiography of my life as a five element acupuncturist, which my Chinese publisher is happy to publish both in an English and a Mandarin version, whenever I have completed it. 

22-16 To China and beyond

These past two years have found me stuck to my sofa, repeatedly recording myself talking about five element acupuncture on video to my students in far-away China, as Covid has prevented all travel and deprived us of the chance of my regular face-to-face seminars.  As of spring 2022, it does not look as though my visits to China will re-start before next year at the earliest, so in the meantime I am helping a good Australian five-element friend work out the format for putting these same sets of videos online for the English-speaking world through an international online platform.  This means that I am re-visiting some of the videos, looking at them with fresh eyes, and eyes now more suited to a Western audience, which is less steeped in the world of the elements than the Chinese are.

This also gives me the opportunity to look again at what I have left to do to promote five element acupuncture, and that has meant re-starting our regular five element seminars in London in the summer.  The first of this year's seminars will be on

Monday 20 June, and an application form can be downloaded from the SOFEA website www.sofea.co.uk, or by emailing teresa@teresaredding.co.uk.

  

And there is my writing to think of.  I like to call what I am now putting into words my Autobiography of a Five Element Acupuncturist.  I am not interested in writing about my life as a whole, only in those areas which have led up to, and then sustained, my five element life.  I've never been interested in exploring the details of my personal life, as some conventional autobiographies do, not least because I don't think it is right to expose my family to the gaze of the world in general.

 

Of course, in looking back at my five element life, which now covers half of all my long years of life, this brings up a host of memories, some lovely, but unhappily quite a few which are painful, if not downright traumatic.  I realise now that there was no point during the 12 years of my college SOFEA's existence when I was not forced to face a high degree of antipathy from fellow acupuncturists towards what I was attempting to do.  All I was intending to do was simply to help maintain the tradition of five element acupuncture teaching which so brilliantly formed the training JR Worsley had introduced in his Leamington College.  I was just attempting to reproduce in my own school what I had been taught as a student, since I could not fault the instruction I had received.  Even now I am at a loss to understand what drove some of JR's devoted former students so vehemently to deny that part of their inheritance which had formed such an integral aspect of their own training.  So that when I came forward with my own plans to found a five element college devoted to this tradition I was treated to an often almost intolerable series of attacks from some of these former students of his who had moved away from the Leamington College to develop their own somewhat different style of teaching.  The very aggressive attempts to close my school down during most of the years of its existence persisted to the extent that students of ours who had attended introductory days at another college were warned off coming to SOFEA because they were told we would never receive the necessary accreditation, something which proved completely untrue.

 

It is to me odd now, from the viewpoint of my 10 years of visits to China, that the almost equivalent span of teaching at SOFEA should have included so many difficult episodes which threatened SOFEA's very existence.  By contrast, these last 10 years I have spent introducing five element acupuncture to the Chinese world have included hardly a moment of discord.  This has a lot to do with the Chinese reverence for learning in any form, as well as that for the life experiences of their teachers.  Put more crudely, the older I have become each year I visit China, the more my visits appear to be appreciated.  I think that the opposite could be said to hold true in the West, which is why so many experienced staff are relieved of their posts in favour of younger colleagues.  Years ago, professors were always senior members of staff.  Now I notice how often what I would still call young people, well under 40 years of age, are the ones promoted to professorships.  This may, of course, be because universities save money by pensioning of their older staff and employing the younger ones in their place, but this is not, I think, the only reason.

 

This brings me neatly to something that has happened so to hearten me that it has dispelled many of the negative feelings which have found expression in this blog.  To my utter astonishment, I have just received the most heart-warming email from a five element practitioner which contained so many echoes of what I had myself had to experience as I attempted to do all I could to keep alive the traditions of five element acupuncture practice which I had inherited.   Here, in this email which winged its way to me from the United States, were described so many of the obstacles I had myself encountered in this country.  Additionally, to my delight, my correspondent expressed understanding and admiration for my own struggles, having witnessed them from afar over many years, both in my books and my blogs, and obviously appreciated how much this had all cost me.

 

It is rare to receive such unexpected recognition of the hurdles that I have had to overcome over the years, showing a true understanding of what they have cost me in sleepless nights and wasted hours.  It puts the many years of struggle in perspective, and gives me even more encouragement to continue doing what I have always tried to do, just pass on my love of five element acupuncture as widely as possible and to as many people as possible.

 

22-15 Sujata's take on Water's way of thinking

Here is my Water friend's answer to my question about how Water does its thinking. This follows on directly from the end of my last blog (22-14):

 

Thank you for asking me to write a bit about how Water expresses itself.  I have been thinking of getting back to writing for some time but nothing was flowing.  This will be a good beginning and I'm happy and grateful that you thought of me.  I am writing mostly about myself (and a few other Water people I know but I don't know how general this information will be).

 

Water, when unimpeded, flows.  It moves in an instinctive manner, not always logical, but usually by feeling its way - sending out sensors to the environment and modulating its response according to what it finds (or feels) is present around it.  Therefore, the way a Water person expresses himself (or herself) depends on how the Water person is feeling at the time and on who he (or she) is interacting with.  Water, in its comfort zone (as it often is with Fire), attempts to express its soul, or sometimes just bubbles along contentedly.  With Metal, Water tends to be more guarded, a bit on edge due to Metal's brevity and conciseness.  With Earth, Water can be very comfortable, but often slips into the mode of a listener, not revealing much of itself.  With Wood (depending on the intensity the Wood person displays), Water often has a disconnect, feeling sometimes unnerved by the push that Wood sends out.  Given a chance, Water would not try to push back (though if it gathers its resources, it probably can), but to bide its time and take a different direction at the earliest possible opportunity.  This is how Water functions when it is close to equilibrium or its natural state.  In times of stress, Water can be greatly affected by fear, reducing its natural flow to a frozen state, but Water, with its resilience, often finds a way to overcome this and continues moving on.

Thank you, Sujata, for these very illuminating descriptions about the way that you think.

22-14 How different elements express their thoughts

I have been thinking about how each element has its own way of expressing its thoughts, since I have noticed that their thought processes are so different.  This is very much in my mind at the moment because Covid lockdowns, whilst restricting my physical movements, seem to have accentuated my mental agility.  My element is Fire, the inner aspect of Fire, with the Small Intestine being what I call my guardian official.  The Small Intestine does the most sorting of its ideas of all the officials, and it likes to communicate the thoughts its very active mind is working upon.  I have often said that I think as I speak, sorting my thoughts out through the act of speaking. This can sometimes be confusing for the listener, for as I sift what I am thinking through, I may alter what I am saying, often in mid-speech, as my mind changes what I started to say.  It needs this form of communication, for in communicating with another person it is doing what all Fire people need to do, which is to set up a relationship with whomever it is with.  And what simpler relationship is there than the act of smiling at another person, one of the signature features of Fire people, and addressing words to another person.  Doing both at the same time is what makes my Fire element the happiest.  Smiles and words reach across the divide between one human being and another, bridging the gap in the quickest way possible, and thereby enabling a relationship to be set up between me and the other person.  

 

It is interesting to look at how the thought processes of the other elements manifest themselves, as far as I understand them.  The element I have always been most aware of, based on my close acquaintance with family members and friends, is the Metal element.  I always think of it as being almost the diametric opposite of my Fire, and have often envied it the kind of detachment it demands, which I can never achieve.  Its way of thinking illustrates this sense of distance between us.  Its thought processes reflect this, for it can stand back, look almost dispassionately at what it is considering as though from a distance, and then draw its conclusions before expressing them succinctly in very few words.  I have a Metal son who can be guaranteed to give me excellent advice about anything I ask him, and does this surprisingly quickly, as though he can think his way rapidly to the heart of the problem, see the solution and express it in the least number of words possible.  I may be talking through a problem to him for some time, going through all the ins and outs as I see them, and he will interrupt me in mid-speech, saying simply, "Just do this", or "Do that", and that is for him the end of the matter.  Metal's thinking is hidden, not out in the open as mine is, but this tends to make it all the more acute and to the point.

 

On the other hand, we can see Earth's thought processes in action quite openly, for it likes to think its thoughts through, often as part of a quite laborious process, going round and round a problem, like a cement-mixer churning things over, drawing the listener into this in its need to share its thoughts.  One of the burdens of being an unbalanced Earth person is therefore their inability to move their thinking on, as though they are a record stuck in the same groove, repeating the same words over and over again.  As practitioners we therefore have to learn ways of interrupting an Earth patient to prevent them from continuously working through the same thoughts in the same words time after time.  Here that lovely point St 9, Head Tied, comes to a practitioner's rescue.  I treasure the time when the moment I needled this point, my Earth patient, in the middle of telling me something, suddenly fell silent, as though he had literally at last been able to swallow his thoughts.  In balance, on the other hand, Earth will be very good at thinking problems through very thoroughly. 

 

Then we come to Wood, another quick-witted element, like Fire, its yang companion, but with none of the need to set up the relationships Fire looks for.  Instead, its thoughts are directed more upon action, ensuring that things are done properly and constructively, that the right structures are put in place to allow things to move forward.  It may send its thoughts out into the world almost in the form of orders (hence the shouting voice), dictated by its need to ensure that everything proceeds in good order.  A Wood friend told me that she thinks of her way of thinking as being like sending out branches from the trunk of a tree in many directions.  It does not matter to her if a branch gets broken off at some point, but each must first be firmly attached to its trunk within her.

 

Finally, I come to Water, and how often I realise that I delay writing about Water until the last, for I see it as the most mysterious of all elements, and even after all these many years of thinking and writing about the elements, at some level Water still remains a mystery to me.  So how do I envisage its way of thinking?  Perhaps its thoughts could be described as being much less clearly defined for me than those of the other elements, but nonetheless they often have the potential to surprise me.  For Water is a deep-feeling element, probably the one that can feel the most, just as the waters of the oceans hide more secrets in their depths than there are on land. 

 

Perhaps I should leave it to Water people themselves to describe their own thought processes for me, since these, much like what Water always does, puzzle me a little.   I have therefore decided that I will send this blog to a young Water friend of mine in India, who always gives me interesting insights into her element.  Perhaps she will be able to add something to my understanding of the way Water thinks. 

22-13 Do I think our guardian element changes during our lifetime?

Many people ask themselves whether our guardian element (CF or dominant element) changes during our lifetime.  I, too, have thought carefully about this for many years, as I have noticed that people, particularly acupuncturists, seem to like to change their own element for another one, often perhaps because they may think it has a better press.  As with all my thoughts about the elements, I always start with myself, because that's the person I know best, having had a lifetime in which to study my own particular element.  

I have often thought how fortunate it was for the direction of that part of my life which was spurred into activity when I encountered the elements for the first time that whatever power or force which controls our individual destinies should have placed me firmly into the little corner of the five element circle housing the Heart and the Small Intestine, and in particular into the welcoming arms of the Small Intestine.  For it is this official, with its intense, unending curiosity and inability to be satisfied with anything until it has probed it to its very core, which made it inevitable that I would never allow my thoughts about the elements to harden into fixed ideas.  Instead, I like to ferret away at every new idea I have, and amend it or discard it if my ever-inquisitive mind feels that is necessary.

 

Looking back at the whole of my now very long life, I can never remember a time when I was not trying to sort out the world and its people, particularly my family in my early years.  In fact they would joke that I was always telling them, "Don't you think you ought to....", as I tried to direct their behaviour in a direction I thought was best for them.  And that is still my first reaction to any situation, as my Small Intestine very quickly (and it is probably the quickest thinker of all the officials) decides what it thinks should be done, and immediately wants to put this into action.   

 

From the evidence of my own life, therefore, I can see no change in how I have approached my life from my earliest days to now in my ripe old age which would indicate that the Small Intestine is not my spiritual home.  Nor have I seen any sign of any similar changes in all the hundreds if not thousands of patients who I have treated or observed over nearly half a century of practice.  

 

Do I therefore think our element changes during our lifetime?  To this I give an emphatic answer, "No, I don't."

 

But then other people may well disagree with me - which is fine.

 

22-12 We should all try to make a difference

I recently read an obituary for a film maker, Roger Graef, of whom I had never heard, but who obviously made many excellent TV films concentrating on changing the ways that victims of injustice were treated.  It quoted him as saying:  "All I ever wanted was to make a difference", and that sparked a new line of thought for me. Surely, I asked myself, that is what every one of us, from the highest to the lowest in the land, should aspire to.  And I thought to myself that it would be good if this could be carved into the tombstone of my life, "Nora made a difference".

 

Can I predict now whether my life will indeed have made a difference to somebody, or to some groups of people?  And if so, in what way?  I'm thinking now not so much of a personal difference, to my friends and family, but to a professional one, as a five element acupuncturist.  All the people who have been treated by me, the people I have talked to in my evening classes, the people I have taught at SOFEA, in European seminars and now in China, all the people who have read or are still reading my books or watching my teaching videos, all these together add up to a goodly number of people.  And among these must surely be many for whom what I have done, either by teaching them, talking to them or treating them, has had some effect upon their lives.  And, if this is so, then I have indeed, through my five element practice, made a difference.

 

But the kind of difference I would like to make is less personally focused upon me than that.  I would like to feel that through my actions I have managed to contribute to rescuing five element acupuncture from the peripheral position it was beginning to be consigned to at the time of JR Worsley's death, and placed it firmly back centre stage again in the eyes of the acupuncture world.  I think we have taken the first steps on the way to doing that, but there is still a long way to go to loosen Western medicine's hold upon the practice of all complementary medical disciplines, including still much of acupuncture.  First steps are always the most difficult, but I am happy that, in this battle for the survival of traditional forms of Chinese medicine, I have managed to enlist the help of the Chinese acupuncture world, with its vast resources, particularly through the contributions made by Professor Liu Lihong.

I hope that by the time I am no longer able to teach, more steps will have been taken, and perhaps even, if the Chinese are involved, there may have been giant strides.  Then indeed I like to think that I would have earned the words on my epitaph, "Nora, you did make a difference." 

22-11 Do all Fire people need to share?

I have suddenly realised that one of the reasons that I have felt compelled to teach (and it is a compulsion, a deep need) was because I like to share my joy in talking about the five elements.  And this need to share is, I now know, one of the mainsprings of my life.  It leads directly to my enjoyment in talking about whatever interests me to everybody I meet, and then moves on to my need to teach and to write.  All these different facets of my life have now come together creatively for me in helping me promote five element acupuncture.

I wonder, though, whether all Fire people have this need to share, or is it more a characteristic of Inner Fire?  My Small Intestine, such a curious official, always tries to sort the meaning of life from all that goes on around it.  It likes to work busily at trying to decipher what it sees, hears and feels, and then hopes to find words to explain what it discovers.  My happening to come across the mysterious realm of the elements all those years ago has provided me with perfect food to feed my curiosity.  That I discovered the exciting new world opening before me just at a time in my life when I was ready for new experiences has always seemed to me to be a perfect example of the often supreme serendipity of life.